AbstractAuthors: Åsa Höjer, Karl WijkmarkTitle: The intercultural communicator. A study of cultures? influence on communication.Level: BA Thesis in Media and Communication StudiesLocation: University on KalmarLanguage: SwedishNumber of pages: 67Date of seminar: 2009-01-15Advisor: Jens CavallinKey words: Intercultural communication, culture, Hofstede´s cultural dimensions, anxiety and uncertainty, self-confidence, high and low context, verbal and nonverbal communication, Telenor, Pakistan, Scandinavia.Case company: TelenorPurpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate what cultural differences, regarding communication, that are present between Scandinavia and Pakistan. Furthermore the purpose is to illustrate which factors that are important for personnel working for Telenor, that are about to work in a foreign culture, in order to create effective intercultural communication.Methodology: The following study is a case study that has used a qualitative methodology with interviews conducted via e-mail. To be able to interpret and understand human experiences and situations a hermeneutical approach has been taken.

Objective: The papers objective is to create a deeper understanding for whether or not cultural and psychic distance affects corporate establishments in the EU.Method: The results have been gathered through intense data collection through interviews with ScaniaAB and Business Sweden. There has also been extensive research of 36 different companies and their first establishments in different countries. We have then analyzed the results through cultural and psychic distance and through Uppsala University's internationalization process model.Conclusion: The conclusions of this paper are:Corporate establishment often occurs in neighboring countries because of the similarity to the domestic markets which contribute with a greater security.Since the introduction of the EU single market, corporate establishments have become easier within the single market.The cultural and psychic distance does exist within the EU, however the internal market decreases these distances and the impact on corporate establishments.The market commitment is essential to the corporates survival within the new market.Cultural and psychic distance affects small firms more often since their lack of network and experience.Cultural and psychic distances are two different but related phenomena..

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to study cultural sponsorshipof cultural institutions and cultural events in some particular pointsof views. Namely, how do the Moderate party look at culturalsponsorship based on their motions and how these motions havebeen received by the Swedish parliament. The aim has beenbroken down into three questions. Firstly, how does the Moderateparty look at sponsorship of cultural institutions and culturalevents based on their motions on the subject. Secondly, whatviews have been existed in parliament both in committee andplenary, against the motions? Thirdly, what are the most relatingparagraphs for the different material groups.

The paper's purpose has evolved during the process of researching and writing it. In the beginning it was to investigate if art and culture could increase the strength and knowledge of a brand and if there existed a knowledge about this amongst Swedish companies, situated in Stockholm. During the process the purpose has evolved into exploring the type of companies that acknowledge this and those that don't. By using Bourdieu's terminology and tools, the reasons behind the use of art has been analyzed.The paper employs an explorative approach by accessing data through interviews and public data provided by the Internet through web pages and government files.The paper comes to the conclusion that what Holt calls cultural branding has not evolved, when looking at the companies that are accurate for this study. Out of 24 companies only one comes close to observing socio cultural movements through the arts.

The educational directive for the school subject textile handicraft (slöjd) claim, that the pupils should have knowledge of handicraft traditions from historical and present perspective. Teachers in handicraft, teaching in schools for the first nine years of a child education forwards a cultural heritage. The purpose of this essay is to find out what the teachers opinion is about what constitute the Swedish textile cultural heritage. How the teachers relate to it and how they use it, then teaching. The essay is based on a qualitative method and consists of interviews with teachers.

The aim of this paper is to investigate dominant beliefs and approaches to the "cultural entrepreneur" both within a public context, and also among business owners within the cultural field. What happens when ideas and attitudes in the public sector towards culture driven businesses meets the perspective of individual cultural entrepreneurs?This study is based on analysis of political documents about the cultural and creative industries (CCI) from the European union, national level and regional level. Interviews with six business owners in the field of culture and one representative of the Swedish region with the fictive name ?Alma? has been conducted.

This survey examines how a regional archive, Värmland Archives, interprets and works from the departure point of national cultural accessibility goal ?Everyone should have the opportunity to participate in cultural life?. And it is also a comporative study of discourse regarding accessibility between Värmland Archives and some other actors in the archival cultural system. Critical discourse analysis, according to Norman Fairclough, is used as a theory method. A discourse analysis is made on empirical data based on document study and qualitative research interviews. My conclusion is that if the term Accessibility is seen as a focal point the accessibility discourse in the documents of Värmland Archives and of the other actors studied can not be clearly discerned. Värmland Archives´s interpretation of terms regarding accessibility analyzed in the survey, varies among the staff regarding how the archives and its services should be accessible, and what accessibility means in the context of the archives.

The purpose of this study was to look at the experiences of midwives in maternalhealth care encounters with non-european-born women and men, and to determine ifmidwives deem any special competence necessary to handle these encounters well.We gathered information by means of qualitative interviews and semi structuredquestions with eight midwives all of whom matched the inclusion criterias and gavetheir personal consent. Midwives from four district health care centers in Uppsalawere included. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed by means of qualitativecontent analysis.The results reveal the experiences from encounters with non-european patients to betwofold. On one hand the encounter is a positive, exiting experience with anopportunity to learn more about a foreign culture and exchange experiences. On theother hand complications can occur as patients may have unexpected expectationsregarding the health care, have great difficulties with the language or haveexperienced traumatizing incidents, all on top of coming to Sweden alone withoutrelatives.In the encounter with non-european-born patients the midwives consider it importantto have special competence in form of knowledge of other cultures and religions asthis provides a greater understanding of the reasoning behind the patients? decisions.Cultural competence is also important as it helps avoid inadvertently insulting thepatient during the encounter.The special competence held by the midwives has been attained from their basic andspecialist education as well as from self acquired experiences and interests.

My main question in this essay has been: why does the preschool advocate being outdoors? How should we respond to parents who have a different view on this? Children's right to participation and influence is also a question that I raise. How should we preschool teachers do when we stand between the child's desire to be out and the parents wish that their child should be indoors? By reading what is written in the preschool curriculum on children's influence, I have come to the conclusion that we preschool teachers must listen to what the children express that they wish to do, otherwise we go against our policy documents.My dilemma is about how to respond to parents who have a different opinion on being outdoors than we have. Many parents express an aversionagainst their children having to be outdoors.

People are usually directed towards each other in conversations, to make it easier to hear what is being said. Algorithms for voice and speech recognition works in a similar way, regarding the microphone direction towards the sound source. In this thesis in electronics has therefore a servo control with binaural sound localization been implemented on a microcontroller connected to two microphones.When people perceive sound, the brain can estimate the sound source direction by comparing the time taken by the sound reaching one ear to the other [1]. The difference in time is called the interaural time difference, and can be calculated using various techniques. An exploratory comparison between the techniques cross-correlation and cross-spectrum analysis was carried out before implementation.

This Masters Degree thesis aims at giving an answer to what underlying ideologies are at work in digitizing our cultural heritage. Other questions to be answered are who are benefiting from a digitized cultural heritage and who are not, and what different opinions about digitizing our cultural heritage can be identified. Two studies are made in this thesis, one of Swedish political documents that concern digitizing our cultural heritage, libraries, museums and archives, and the other one is a study of documentation of three Swedish digitizing projects. In the first study three different, but closely associated ideologies are identified, namely a preserving, b giving access and c a mixture of both, and these are shown in a model. In the second study this model is then used to identify the ideologies of one project from each sector of the so called ABM-sector Archives, Libraries and Museums.

Logistik är mer än transporter mellan olika platser. Stor del av ett företag och dess logistik kretsar kring de interna logistikfunktioner och hur de som företag ständigt jobbar för att förebygga flaskhalsar. En lagervariant som används för att skapa ett högre värde i en kedja är ett så kallat cross-dockinglager. I ett sådant förs ständigt ett arbete med att effektivisera processer med hjälp av olika tekniker och strategier. En teknik för att öka omsättningshastigheten i ett lager genom snabbare identifiering och spårning av gods som hanteras är Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).Syftet med studien är att belysa de ständigt återkommande problemområden som uppstår i ett cross-dockinglager samt hur en RFID-lösning skulle kunna stödja dess verksamhet.

Bakgrund: Bålträning kan användas vid prevention, behandling samt för att öka prestationsförmåga. Vilken typ av bålträning som är lämpligast för de olika ändamålen är dock fortfarande oklart, vilket till viss del beror på brist på tydliga definitioner inom området. Mot bakgrund av specificitetsprincipen inom träningslära och bålmuskulaturens olika indelningar och dess muskelfysiologi, vill författarna undersöka om en cross-overeffekt kan uppnås mellan två olika typer av uthållighetsträning, liksom träningens effekter på bålstabilitet. Syfte: Syftet var att beskriva observerade och mätbara effekter av dynamisk bålträning på statisk uthållighet i bålmuskulaturen, och omvänt, samt de observerade och mätbara effekterna av de respektive träningsformerna på resultatet av ett bålstabilitetstest. Metod: Studiedesignen var single subject experimental design (SSED).

This thesis deals with the cultural efforts of the Swedish labour movement during the periodof 1917-1939. It aims to examine the similarities and differences between social democratsand communists in their approach towards culture.My theoretical guidelines are the dialectic and materialistic view on history as set forth byKarl Marx and Friedrich Engels.I have examined some important individuals in the cultural debate within the Swedish labourmovement, such as Ture Nerman and Arthur Engberg, and I also briefly outline the debate inthe Soviet Union from the classics of Lenin and Stalin.I have found that the social democrats were mainly concerned with a democratic distributionof the existing bourgeois culture rather than working for the creation of a new proletarianculture; the communists on the other hand made considerable efforts to benefit the workers'own culture based on class struggle, but failed to threaten the social democratic ideologicalhegemony among the Swedish working class..

Introduction: In this investigation I have illustrated, teacher treatment in a mono-cultural pre-school class and in a multicultural pre-school.Purpose: The purpose of the study was to illustrate how educators go about it when they face bilingual children to see how they work in a comparative perspective. The purpose was answered, based on four questions relating to how teachers relate to the meeting with bilingual children, the approach teachers use, which operation mode the use, if the take advantage of children's traditions, and if there is any different in the teachers? treatment of bilingual children in the mono-cultural pre-school class and in the multicultural pre-school.Theories: The theory is linked to the concepts like operation mode, inter-cultural approaches and communications.Methodology: The used methods are qualitative interviews with four pre-school, teachers where an interview guide with formulated questions and observations were used. The purpose of the working methods was to highlight teacher treatment of bilingual children to discover different approaches to meet the bilingual children.Conclusion: The study has shown that the multicultural pre-school working inter-culturally, they are taking advantage of children's home language that is lifted in the nursery and the children's background, while in the mono-cultural pre-school class, they meet bilingual children foremost to develop the Swedish language and they also show interest to the children's traditions. Teachers? treatment leads to a growing confidence in the children and knowledge for the cultural background..